I'm not normally one for achievement hunting, but back in 2017, I wanted to get the There is No Spon achievement for Factorio and when I saw the new Express Delivery (Complete the game in 40 hours) I knew I had to get it as well. I played through the game once before trying this and even with the amount of screwing around I did on this playthrough, I still easily managed it at the 29 hour mark. If you are determined and work directly towards the goal of finishing the game, it's fairly easy to do.

Unfortunately, the steam achievement for Express Deliver and Work Around the Clock (100 hours) are both currently broken... I got the finish game achievement and my final playtime is well under the 40 hour mark but I got neither :/ Very sad day, but I planted a save right before the end so once it's fixed I can grab it lol.

Unlike the no spoon challenge, I actually genuinely really enjoyed this challenge. Previously, your one and only goal was to craft enough resources to get the rocket silo, 100 rocket parts, and a satellite and that's it. For speed running space age, you truly need to think ahead and create the resources you'll need far down the line. I hadn't even placed nuclear power or turrets for the most part before leaving Nauvis and I was already crafting them because I knew I would need it for my final ship design. The very first time I tried this run, I turned asteroids down very low to make it easier. However, I realized it also turns down how much resources you got in space and I starved my ships for resources and couldn't get anywhere. So, on my winning run, I turned it up... to 150%.

I didn't think much of it until I went to my first planet, and promptly burned through 2000 rounds of ammo getting there. I thought it was probably because I had no damage researched, and it was, but it was around now I remembered turning up the spawn rate lol. I thought at this point I may have screwed myself, I had no clue if I was going to be able to finish the game when I was struggling just to get to the first three planets.

But, I pushed through, researching non stop into damage as I worked my way through the 4 planets and by the time I was ready for the final push, I was pushing damage level 12. I loaded up my ship with stupid amounts of explosives to manufacture ammo as I flew for my railguns, rockets, and turrets. Despite the 6000 something explosives I had and the pre-made 2000 - 4000 rounds of each type of ammo, by the time I was nearing the end game, I had completely run out of explosives and was slowly burning through my stockpile of ammo.

I made it with enough headroom to also grab the 60,000km achievement to the Shattered Planet.

Going back to playing Vanilla for the first time in well over 7 years, I was genuinely surprised at how much the game has matured. I always play with a bunch of QoL mods and I was very nervous going into this because I knew I would miss them. Genuinely, the only one I TRULY missed was the Rate Calculator mod, WHYYYY isn't this in vanilla yetttt! Joking aside, with the flow rates overlay of vanilla and the copy tool, it was very easy to determine rates myself and I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Most of the mods I used before 2.0 have become integrated into the base game and it's fantastic to see, vanilla was a genuine delight to play despite my initial speciesism. Also, why isn't there research into larger scan area for radar yet like Big Brother?... I'm going to grab most of the rest of the achievements while Express Delivery is fixed and then, I'm going to install a bunch of mods.

Galaxy of fame:

https://factorio.com/galaxy/Sulfur IV: Iota7-5.F7X7